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4) Spotlight

The best films about journalists are themselves works of journalism. They're less concerned with histrionics and eureka moments than they are with the process of gathering information, sorting through it, and trying to make sense of a wealth of disparate facts. Spotlight is a great example of the form, one which takes Tom McCarthy's typically laid-back style and applies it to the more rigorous structure of the investigation into a decades-long sexual abuse scandal. The final result is not showy, but its meticulousness is admirable, though there's still plenty of room for its talented cast to bring some ruffled life to their characters.

3) Brooklyn

It would be easy to dismiss Brooklyn as the kind of pleasant, middlebrow literary adaptation that The Academy tends to favor. While it's undeniably gentile and nice, neither of which are adjectives that get the blood pumping, it's also an incredibly well-realized example of a type of film that can be so mediocre. It's a beautiful, heartwarming romance that finds its tension from the points at which good intentions come into conflict. There's no out and out villain in Brooklyn, just people who want different things, and watching Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen and Domhnall Gleeson articulate and navigate those intricacies makes it one of the most warm and human films of the year. It's that very quality which makes its more conventional moments hit harder than they would in a more typical rendering of this story.

2) Room

It's easy to imagine a version of Room that is completely terrible. A version that takes the premise of a woman and her young child being held captive for years and turns it into cloying melodrama or pure exploitation. Lenny Abrahamson's film is much more restrained than either of those scenarios, painfully so at times, but it's also far stranger and more disorientating than his minimalist approach would suggest. By keeping Jack (Jacob Tremblay, giving one of THE great child performances), a young boy who has only ever known the inside of a small room, as the audience's viewpoint, he and screenwriter Emma Donoghue (adapting her own novel) tell a tale of survival that is as much about the difficulties of adjusting to a new world as it is about the mechanics of escaping a terrible situation. That they handle both beautifully is a testament to the skill of everyone involved.

1) Mad Max: Fury Road

Everything about Mad Max: Fury Road is a miracle. A fourth film in a franchise, one that comes 30 years after the previous installment, shouldn't be one of the best films of the year, yet it was. An aggressively idiosyncratic work from a veteran filmmaker shouldn't connect with a mass audience, yet it did. And a summer blockbuster should not be nominated for Best Picture, yet it was. So much has been written about how great Mad Max: Fury Road is as a technical achievement, as a work of entertainment, and as a brash assault on misogyny, so I don't need to reiterate it. All that needs saying is that it's one of the most distinctive blockbusters in recent memory, and that its critical and commercial success are reason enough to have hope in the future of big-budget filmmaking.

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